My 2¢ Worth

've mentioned in this column before how much I love my job. There really is nothing I'd rather be doing at this stage of my life. I was born to be a Web designer!

 while back, a friend of mine asked if there were ever days when I had to force myself to work; where it took every bit of internal fortitude I could muster to sit in front of this screen and do my job.

n a word... No.

hat being said, however, I must admit there are certain aspects of my job I do not enjoy. I have a client I'm working for right now whose work I had been putting off for some time because the fun part is basically done and now it's mostly a matter of copying and pasting Web copy. I find that to be nearly as boring as watching grass grow.

very job has its good and its bad points. I don't know if there's any such thing as a perfect job. You just have to take the bad with the good as you do with most things in life.

o for me Web design is about as perfect as it gets. I hope you get as much satisfaction out of your job. If not, maybe it's time to consider a career change...

Feature Article

Understanding your Website's Performance:

The analysis of your main page.

by: Paul Barrs ebusiness Mastery

One of the most under-rated aspects of any Website business is in its statistical data, or more accurately, its owner's ability to interpret that data.

Among the myriad of information that your web host (or stats manager) can provide you with, none of it actually provides real value at all given times.

Let me explain.

Here is a real life example of one local accommodation website and their statistics as of the time of writing this article. It's a relatively new website, and has had some modifications progressively done to it over the past few months.

First up, the one piece of data that almost everyone knows about is Page Views.

Page Views provide you with a quick picture of your overall traffic. When you compare this information with previous weeks or months it's a good snapshot - nothing more. However, Unique Visitors are more important because they represent the actual number of different people who have viewed your site's pages, rather than repeat visitors, within the same day, same week, and with disregard to how many pages any Unique Visitor visits on your site.

In practical terms, the Demo Site that I am using here has had 2610 Page Views so far this month, but only 1171 Unique Visitors - which means that each visitors has viewed an average of 2 - 3 pages each.

What does that mean?

This Website only has five pages, so based on these numbers we can ascertain that only its visitors view half of those pages. With this information at hand, before we do any work on the site, we need to first see which pages are being viewed.

Using the Entry Pages report we are able to see that 85% of all visitors this month so far arrived on the main page. This alone is an interesting fact as it tells us that the site is receiving search engine traffic to the other pages because there is simply no other way to find them otherwise. It also tells us that the content of the main page may need to be modified if people are not going deeper into the site.

So how do we find that out? We go into the Exit Pages report. Here (in our demo site) we find that 73% of visitors are leaving from the main page. First up, that does not look too good. Could it be that once people arrive on this site that they don't like it at all?

Finally, to determine this, we need to view the Single Access Pages report - and it this case - yes, it is bad news. 68% of all visitors to this site are arriving on the main page and then leaving again.

Here is the question that we need to ask: What is it about the main page that people don't like? (And the question I ask to you - Do you even know how many people arrive on your main page and then leave again?)

The next tactical piece of information I would want to know here is, what is bring them to the site. Are they qualified customers, or are they kids looking for games to play?

Checking the Search Engine Keywords report, we were able to ascertain that just over 25% of all their traffic this month had come from 15 different search engines, through a combination of over 100 different keyword search phrases. That alone is not enough to determine the problem here. All of these people were targeted customers. However, also using the Referring Website Domains report we could see that a whopping 68% of all visitors came from a recent email marketing campaign advertisement.

Ah Ha! Now, we are getting to the meat of it. Speaking with the owner I was able to determine that in the previous week they had placed an ad about a few limited available rooms they still had available for let January, at the end of the School Holidays. The ad had gone out to almost 1200 people (opt in subscribers of a local tourism Website) and 673 of those people had clicked on their URL (a massive 56% response), wanting to look over their available holiday dates.

And guess what was on the main page? Yep - the details of a limited offer 7-night package.

So right now we've gone a complete circle. We knew that there must have been something wrong with the main page (in fact we actually knew exactly what it was in advance), but the exercise had allowed me to explain to you in finer details just how you should be looking to evaluate and interpret your own Website statistics.

What if you were not running a targeted campaign for a special offer? How about if these were the results on any normal given week? Then what?

As a closing thought - the first thing I'd want to know is this: Time Spent on Site.

Before making major changes to your website content, you need to determine if people are reading / viewing it or not. Using the above example, 51% of visitors to this site in the past two weeks have stayed between 1 - 5 minutes. Good or bad?

A bit of both. We'd like people to stay onsite for more than five minutes, but with only five pages, that's not going to happen unless you have a very long sales letter up front. So that's the good part. The bad part is only 38% of these visitors invested the time to actually read the home page sales information. The rest just left.

If this were your website, you'd now have to decide how best to service those 38%. Do that, and you'll strike gold.

So back to the title: How well do you understand your Websites performance?

**************

Paul Barrs is the owner of many successful websites, including his latest "How-To" video series, the "eBusiness Mastery Video and Audio Learning System". www.ebusiness-mastery.com

Use your own image to submit a form

To submit a form normally you would use an INPUT with type="submit". This creates a dull grey button with the word submit on it. But sometimes its nicer to jazz thing up a bit using your own image for a submit button. This can be done by using an INPUT with type="image", like this:

<input type="image" src="your-button.gif" border="0">

Here's what you get:

Notice that I've used the border="0" attribute. This prevents having that blue line around your image.

* Get these syndicated tip feeds for your web site, free. *

---

ad box #4 PrePromote: pro-active pre-promotion software PrePromote is a free, easy-to-use and effective software tool that will help prepare your website for being listed on search engines. PrePromote can: Create metatags which describe your pages to search engines. Analyze your web pages and point out possible improvements. Generate doorway pages to get higher search engine positions. PrePromote is freeware, which means you can download and use it forever without charge - no strings attached!       Download PrePromote today at: paradigmwebdesign.net/zips/prepromote.Zip

Imagine your ad above! For rates click HERE

Second Article

How To Accept Credit Cards Online

by: Jim Edwards TheNetReporter.com Online E-newsletter

Anyone with an online business, whether for auctions, services, or virtually any type of product, has asked the same question at some time during their quest to create the ultimate online business - "How do I accept credit cards?"

Since over 90% of all transactions on the Internet involve customers paying by credit card, accepting plastic money rates a must for almost any business.

The problem for most small online business owners involves the high cost of setting up and maintaining a credit card merchant account.

With startup fees ranging from $200 to $500, minimum monthly fees of at least $40 to $50, plus per transaction fees and a percentage of sales, most people who want to supplement their income online or test an idea can't risk that kind of money.

Add in credit checks, 48-month service contracts, expensive equipment purchases or leasing, financial statements, and last 3 years' tax returns and most people throw up their hands and give up before they even get started.

Fortunately several companies responded to this problem with unique solutions that enable smaller online merchants to accept credit cards at a fraction of those high startup costs with no long-term commitment, no equipment purchases, and zero minimum monthly fees.

PayPal.com

PayPal has gotten some negative press over the last couple of years, but that press has been mostly undeserved.

PayPal makes it easy for you to collect money for your online sales, send money to merchants, bill people monthly, collect dues and donations and integrate a free shopping cart into your site.

Of all the payment and money transfer services online, PayPal ranks as the absolute lowest in cost and the easiest to set up.

PayPal allows merchants to sell physical and downloadable products along with personal services.

ClickBank.com

For a $50 one-time fee ClickBank enables online ebook, software and other electronic information sellers to not only accept credit cards, but provide instant delivery of their products to online purchasers.

ClickBank allows any merchant to accept virtually every major credit card on the planet.

The online merchant simply adds a purchase link to their site, the customer clicks the link, fills in their payment information and the credit card gets authorized on the spot.

Once the card gets approved ClickBank redirects the buyer to a page that enables them to download the ebook, software, or other product they have just purchased.

ClickBank also operates a fully integrated affiliate program that automatically pays affiliates who sell your products for you.

ClickBank heavily restricts what merchants may sell through the service and does not allow the sale of physical goods.

PaySystems.com

Of the three, Paysystems behaves most like a traditional credit card merchant account.

The service allows the merchant to integrate with a number of third-party shopping carts as well as use the PaySystems shopping cart system.

Merchants pay a small transaction fee and a percentage of the sale, but don't sign up for any long-term service contracts or equipment leases.

**************

Author and co-author of several highly successful ebooks, including "How to Write and Publish your own eBook... in as littl as 7 Days" www.7dayebook.com. Writes a syndicated offline Newspaper Column - www.thenetreporter.com - focusing on ebooks, tips, tricks, expert interviews, & more!

**************

Download of the Week

FREESCO Router with many features of a full OS. Easy to setup and can be run off a single floppy. Download FREESCO

---

Comments?

If you'd like to comment on any aspect of this publication, send an E-mail to
comments@ paradigmwebdesign.net

---

If you enjoyed The Web Sm@rts Newsletter, forward it to your friends, family and associates. They'll thank you for it!

---

Do you know someone who might be interested in receiving
Web Sm@rts?
Recommend us!

---

NOTE: You have received this message because you or one of your friends added your name to our list of those who may wish to receive this newsletter.

If you do not wish to receive this newsletter, please point your browser to http://paradigmwebdesign.net/unsubscribe.html

FYI: Web Sm@rts will never share your E-mail address or personal information with any other party for any reason what-so-ever.

---

This newsletter is never sent unsolicited.
To unsubscribe, point your browser to http://paradigmwebdesign.net/unsubscribe.html

Tell them Web Sm@rts referred you!

Recommended Reading

I highly recommend the following E-zines.

ThePortalToSuccessE-Zine

Interactive Marketing Ezine

Looking for free newsletters? Just visit the EzineXchange, Select the ones of interest and subscribe. It's free!
ezinexchange.com

Find other great e-mail newsletters and Ezines at the Cumuli Ezine Finder: www.cumuli.com/ezines/

Web Site and E-zine Promotion for Idiots
Get your copy from PWD and get lots of traffic to your Web Site or E- zine instantly.

Use Link Crafter to drive more traffic to your site. Free download from PWD.
lc.exe

Text Tally from
Harmony Hollow software
is a handy text counting utility. Download it free from PWD
Download now

E-Zine Advertising WORKS!
Place your ad in 100s of e-zines like this one. The E-Zine AdSource Directory is the place to find discount e-zine ad space. Come see!
ezineadsource.com

Tutorials

Elated Webdesign Tips
Javagoodies JavaScript Repository
Website Abstraction Westciv: CSS Resources